The free leak check reads a PDF the way the other side would: it extracts the text of every page and searches it for Social Security, account, routing and card numbers, dates of birth, emails and phone numbers, finds text still sitting under black boxes or hidden on the page, and lists the metadata, comments, form fields, bookmarks and attachments in the file. It runs in your browser; the file is not uploaded. Free, no account.

Why a black box is not a redaction

A black rectangle drawn over text in most PDF editors only covers it. The text is still in the file: copy and paste, a search, or any text extractor reads it straight out. Some checkers look only under redaction marks. This one searches the whole file, so it also finds a number nobody marked at all.

What it reports

• Every Social Security, tax ID, account, routing, card, IBAN, licence and passport number, date of birth beside a label, email and phone number in the text, by page, with the digits partly dotted out.
• Text that is in the file but not visible: under a box or an image, white on white, invisible, or off the edge of the page.
• Metadata (title, author, subject, keywords, XMP), bookmarks, attachments, comments, form fields and redaction marks that were never applied.
• Pages it could not check: scanned pages and pages with no text layer.

Found something? The same files open in the redaction tool, which removes what you choose, can keep the last four digits, and Bates-numbers the set. The first 10 pages are free.